Does new equal better at Google now?
January 2nd, 2008 Jason Posted in Google, seo |
An interesting question on the Google Operating System blog, related to my post about Google’s quick indexing: does the new hi-speed indexing mean that newer pages are being artificially weighted to rank higher?
The argument is that a brand-new page won’t have a bunch of backlinks pointing to it, so there’s no reason it should appear near the top of the SERPs directly after being indexed…unless Google is giving greater importance - at least temporarily - to newer content.
Maybe it’s only true for whatever they currently identify as ‘hot topics,’ but it’ll be worth watching. I may try a little experiment to document later today or next week; I’ve certainly seen Google give a nice big boost to a newly indexed page before it fell off into a more stable position. If, by interpreting ‘more recent’ content as ‘more relevant’ content, Google has slipped up here, it’s only a matter of time before the blogspammers start capitalizing on it by simply posting more crap more frequently to maintain consistent high rankings.
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